Frequently asked questions about recruitment marketing

What does recruitment marketing cost at Leadstars?

Leadstars works on a monthly or annual retainer with a one-off implementation fee at the start of the engagement. The agreed lead volume is guaranteed: if a campaign does not deliver the promised number, you do not pay for the shortfall. A 7-day delivery guarantee applies.

There is no fixed price list, because the amount depends on the number of function groups, the number of regions and whether you want only the candidate side or the client side as well. Ad budget sits outside that and goes straight to the channels.

Everything about pricing

What happens if a campaign does not reach the agreed number of leads?

Then you do not pay for the shortfall. The agreed lead volume is a guarantee, not a forecast, and that is exactly why we do not take on every engagement: we only start where the function group, region and budget make delivery realistic.

In practice lead volume comes down to three things: how tight the function group is, how large the region is and how fast follow-up happens. The last one is the only one the client controls, and it is usually the biggest variable.

How the guarantee works

How long before a recruitment campaign produces results?

The first campaign goes live within 7 days of the kick-off. The first applications usually arrive within days after that, because a campaign on Meta or TikTok buys reach immediately and does not have to wait for indexing.

What takes longer is getting cost per candidate stable. That needs two to four weeks of optimization: filtering audiences, replacing creatives and shortening the application flow.

The full timeline

What is a good cost per applicant for a staffing agency?

There is no single number that holds for every function group. In our own campaigns candidate cost runs between €8.96 and €30.51 per candidate, and that spread comes almost entirely from how tight the function group is and how large the region is.

What matters more than the amount is what you compare it against. Put cost per candidate next to your margin per placement and next to what an open assignment costs you, not next to another agency's cost per candidate in a different market.

Cost per applicant explained

What is a Job Acquisition Machine (JAM)?

JAM stands for Job Acquisition Machine: the system with which you bring in candidates structurally instead of starting a campaign per vacancy. It consists of audience definition, ads on Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Google, landing pages, multi-channel job distribution to 15+ job boards, AI sourcing on your own database and daily follow-up.

So you are not buying individual candidates, you are getting an engine that keeps running. Its counterpart on the client side is CAS, the Client Acquisition System, which delivers 5 to 20 qualified client leads per month.

What JAM covers exactly

How does a staffing agency get more clients?

With the same logic as on the candidate side, but aimed at a different profile. The Client Acquisition System first defines the ideal client profile (industry, size, region, function groups), builds a list around it and approaches that list through LinkedIn, email and ads, with follow-up until a conversation is booked.

It delivers 5 to 20 qualified client leads per month. That is deliberately not a volume game: a hundred generic messages produce less than twenty messages that land exactly on the role that company cannot fill right now.

Marketing for staffing agencies

Do you also work for specific function groups such as technicians or healthcare staff?

Yes. What differs per function group is not the method but the message and the channel: technicians and drivers are mostly reached on Meta outside office hours, engineers and account managers on LinkedIn, and hospitality staff on Meta and TikTok. There is a separate page per function group with the approach that works there.

All function groups

Do you work nationally or per region?

Campaigns are set up per region, even when a client operates nationally. Candidates choose on travel distance, not on city limits: in Amsterdam you effectively recruit in Zaanstreek and Almere, in Twente along the Enschede, Hengelo and Almelo axis, and in Venlo often multilingually because part of the pool lives across the border.

Regions we work in

Can we see what your campaigns have produced before?

Yes. The case library shows campaign figures per client: number of leads, cost per lead and campaign duration. We deliberately report only campaign results there, not placements or won clients, because what happens after the lead sits with the client.

View the cases

What do terms like CPL, EVP and programmatic job advertising mean?

They are all explained in the glossary: over seventy terms from recruitment marketing and labor market communications, in plain language, each with its own anchor link so you can point to it directly.

Go to the glossary

How quickly do we need to call an applicant?

The same day, and preferably within a few hours. This is the one factor in the whole process the client fully controls, and it is usually what separates a campaign that works from a campaign that produces leads nobody acts on.

For function groups that apply outside office hours, such as drivers and production workers, we set follow-up up so the call happens first thing the next morning.

How we set campaigns up